


Everything Falls

by peppydragon



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Angst, Angst fic request that got a wee bit out of hand, As you do, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Death, Dying alone, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, In the Fade, Language, Violence, and yet here we are, dont read it unless you really want to but jeeze, i hate the fade, its hawke, ive written a few hawke/varric fics that are super sweet, killing my favourite character, like this is a bummer, obviously, seriously last warning - shit's depressing, so you can read those instead if you want?, the Fade sucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-21
Updated: 2019-08-21
Packaged: 2020-09-23 14:44:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20341834
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peppydragon/pseuds/peppydragon
Summary: Hawke knows she's dying well before she does. And still, she fights.





	Everything Falls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jaden56](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jaden56/gifts).

> I don't own anything! All characters and locations belong to Bioware. Please enjoy! 
> 
> Story Warnings: violence, language, character death

* * *

Anders.

Anders is the first person that Marian Hawke thinks about when she knows she's going to die. She swings her body low, narrowly missing another attack from the shadow-things that love tormenting her. _Her roommates, _Anders might tease in the same way he referred to rats in the clinic.

_Fucking Anders._

Her left dagger slides neatly under where the creature's ribs should be; the blade strikes clean through, shredding the darkness. The creature dissipates into the cloying air. She twists at the waist, changing course, bringing the knife in a backward weep and removing another's hand. It leads into a backwards roll, swooping out of the way of a sword that doesn't look more solid than ash.

But ash can hurt here. Hawke has learned that much over the past day.

Day? _Days?_

_Anders._ Anders is the reason this is happening. Anders started the entire mess. If it weren't for Anders, there wouldn't have been a war. A Divine Conclave. There wouldn't be super-charged factions; there would be a united front to rally and fight Corypheus.

They might have stopped this before it even started if Anders and his warped sense of justice hadn't gone and ruined the whole bloody thing.

Hawke shouts in pain as something slices across her calf, buckling her for a moment, her eyes swimming in tears. She doesn't know how she still has enough liquid in her body to cry but damned if she isn't doing it. She rolls, barely missing another nick to her right arm.

Her heart slams around in her chest, pumping so hard that she doesn't know how it isn't giving out, how the adrenaline is keeping her upright, how she has any strength to stand.

_Carver. Mother._

_Bethany._

The thought of her sister brings a sob to Hawke's lips as she limps up and away, nearly losing the dagger in her left hand. It's going numb. That hammer-strike she took must have done more damage than she realised.

She chuckles - a pitchy, helpless thing - and backs herself against a slick rock wall. She tries to breathe, tries to catch any semblance of composure she can, and watches them shuffle toward her.

Most are unarmed - she should focus on those first, she thinks. She can slice through them with relative ease so long as their sworded brethren don't get too close. She can roll right through the middle of the group, slide across the stone, swing, sever a leg from the shadows at either side - two down in a single move.

Easy; Hawke's done it millions of times. Hell, she'd go as far as to say she's quite good at taking things off their feet.

_"Sweep the leg!" Bethany shouts, clapping her small hands together while watching Marian. She giggles every time Marian gives in, every time Marian ducks into a fast crouch, every time she swings a leg out, hooking her ankle around the training dummy's stand, sweeping it to the ground with little effort._

_Some effort. Those training dummies were hard to knock over when Marian was twelve years old._

Hawke cries out when she tries her tactic. It doesn't work - mainly because there's no surface to slide across. She isn't in Kirkwall where things as trivial as _logic_ and _physics _never seemed to matter. Now she's in the Fade where logic and physics also don't seem to matter, but this time they don't matter in someone else's favour.

She falls into the shallow water, the muck clinging to her knees, sucking her in.

Hawke laughs - she can't help it. Peels of the sound come out, ricocheting around, making her eyes water. All of the pains die out for a moment, leaving nothing but a divine sense of finality.

It's finally over.

She can finally rest.

She can sit here and let the mud suck her in, allow these beasts and creatures to tear her apart.

It would be so easy.

Hawke thinks about the people she'll leave behind - that she's already left behind if she's honest - and says a little goodbye to them. _I died on my feet, _she murmurs like a prayer, hoping they somehow know. And then she looks down at the murky water she's sitting in.

She's literally on her knees.

She's literally giving up.

"Fuck," she curses hotly.

The first creature reaches her; it's a shambling thing that may have been a corpse in some version of Hell, but not in any she prepared for. Even so, she grabs onto the weeping, bloated arm. The skin slides down and off as she tugs herself onto her feet. The thing doesn't notice that its bicep is now in the water, or that she tore its hand off and flung it in its face before trying to run. It swings its remaining hand at her, grabs a fist-full of her matted hair, and pulls her back.

Hawke doesn't hesitate this time. Her right hand sweeps up behind her, her dagger slicing through the already-short locks. She feels fingertips bounce off of her neck. She feels hot wetness - her blood, she assumes, seeing as there's little chance she didn't graze some scalp in the move.

It probably doesn't matter; she isn't sure if anything matters anymore. All Hawke knows is that she's on her feet and she's not going down again until she physically can't do anything else.

It's what her father would have wanted. What everyone she knew would have wanted.

What Varric would have wanted.

Many sounds have come from Hawke's lips since she's been here; none have been pleasant, but this one... This one rattles her bones. It heaves her belly into her chest and her heart into her throat. It makes her stumble, makes her almost lose her balance.

Here he is. Here is his name, finally, _finally_ slipping through her barriers, her steel doors, her layers of stone. He's in the air, and she can't shake him away.

Two more come at her - one has a weapon, the other does not. Against her own logic, Hawke veers toward the sword-wielder first, sidling into its defences, slicing twice with each blade before flowing around him, kicking him into the shallows.

The other charges at her, somehow navigating better now that the other is dead. Its hands reach, mindless, and she cuts them at the wrist. She comes in closer, stabbing both daggers into its chest, into the space its heart would be.

A hand grips her shoulder, tugging her backwards.

_Varric's hand finds Marian's shoulder when she needs it. She isn't sure how he knows, but he does. Anytime she's too overwhelmed - anytime she struggles with her uncle or money or a litany of other things she tries to hide - he touches her shoulder. _

_And then she can breathe. Her entire body lightens. Her mind quiets. For a few blissful moments, she forgets everything except his hand on her shoulder._

_She told her sister it wasn't a crush-at-first-sight, as Bethy teased. _

_It wasn't. But it was damn near close._

Hawke arches her back and rolls her shoulder out from under the uncoordinated grip, shimmying aside. A dagger slides into the shadow's chest while a knee slams into its belly. She uses her other blade to sever the place a spine should be - just out of pure bloody spite, just to make herself feel like she's still in control.

A sound shatters through everything - it's a screech, something inhumane and too familiar. It makes Hawke stumble, shoving the pulsing mess of dying shadow off of her.

The Nightmare got bored of watching. The Nightmare is coming to find her.

Hawke runs.

_Marian loved running - she sometimes brought Kane along when they patrolled the Wounded Coast. While Varric would take a more natural approach to the patrol, Marian and Kane would run. They'd sprint ahead and back, Kane barking like mad and Marian giggling breathlessly when she eventually tired before the Mabari._

_That stopped when Hawke became Champion, though. Most fun things stopped when she became Champion. Her days are suddenly full of meeting her mother's old friends - and their eligible sons, much to Marian's horror - and dealing with every major force in the city. _

_Varric takes Kane out for her sometimes, but she rarely has the time for their runs anymore._

Hawke runs and tries not to think of Kane, of the hound who worshipped her, who sacrificed himself to save her from a wyvern. From a stupid misstep. Just a tiny error of foot placement. That's all.

Her rashness killed him.

"There you are," she hears. The Nightmare demon's voice echoes in her very skull, too close and intimate to be heard over the splashes of her footfalls. But it's there. It's crawling like spiders along her skin.

She keeps running until her foot hit a loose rock and sends her sprawling, face-first across a sandbar of debris. She lays there in the refuse and heaves for breaths. Something broke. A rib, if she has to guess.

"Perfect," she tries to whisper to herself. It comes out as a horrified groan, breaking halfway through, erupting into a cough that sends black spots across her vision.

_"It's just a broken rib," Varric teases her._

_"It's three, actually," Marian grumbles, trying to adjust herself against the headboard. She smiles, wanly; it's the best she can do at the moment. "How soon until we're at war with the qunari?"_

_"We already are. Or we always have been. Or never - it depends on who you ask." He shrugs as if it's nothing - as if Hawke didn't take down the Arishok two days ago. As if Hawke didn't put her life on the line for a woman who lied to them. Who put her needs above theirs - above the whole city's._

_"Can I be honest with you?" she asks._

_Varric's smile softens a bit as he steps further into the room. He closes the door to a crack and comes to the bedside. "That's how this works, yes."_

_"I think I'm scared." She whispers it because she doesn't want him to hear. But he does hear it because he gets onto the bed and sits beside her. He holds her hand. _

_She starts crying. Each sob wrenches her insides until she passes out from the pain._

"Don't go," she whispers into the shards of shale and glass beneath her lips. She needs to see him again. She just needs to see him, to remember that there were times when things were good. There were even times when things were perfect.

The clicking of the demon's spindly legs comes closer and closer. Hawke can feel him in the air. The smaller darknesses ran from him or reformed into him - she doesn't know which and doesn't care because they aren't trying to claw her skin off anymore.

"Small blessings," she mumbles and then coughs a whining laugh. When she can see again, she swallows down the bile and pushes herself upward. She wails when her broken rib shifts, scraping across something, sinking in.

She coughs and gasps and knows it's her lung. Her arms are shaking. She needs to get up, but she's stuck in a half-pushup position, eyes clenched tight, muscles screaming. "Get up," she orders herself.

Hawke convinces her knees to bend, her legs to rock forward, thighs easing beneath her. She drapes her upper body against them for a moment, gasping and gagging, hands helplessly fumbling, looking for her daggers. Her hands find blown apart glass and shards of wood, slices of steel, and they all cut her.

But not her blades.

"No," she whispers. "No. No no no _no!" _The shout tears her chest to pieces, eviscerating her from the inside. The blood is coming with each cough now. It's splattering her wet breeches.

"Hawke," the demon says from right behind her.

_"Hawke!"_

_That voice. The voice she'd know anywhere. Marian turns away from her rucksack, barely managing to see him before he's barrelling into her, his arms around her waist, face pressed against her sternum._

_"Maker, Varric, you act like you haven't seen me in a year," she teases. Tries to tease - the tears are falling before she can contain them. She slides to her knees in the rented room in the Herald's Rest, pulling Varric against her, pressing her face into the crook of his neck, lips above his frantically beating jugular._

_"I thought you were dead," he whispers._

_"You'll be in the ground long before I'm dead, Tethras," she replies even though her voice is too choked to laugh; her hands are too shaky to release him, to do anything but cling to him._

_"You look-"_

_She pulls back and shakes her head. "Me first. I'm in love with you. I've been in love with you since...Maker, since that time you came over to Gamlin's to rescue me from his nonsense." _

_"Ah - lunch at that little cafe by the harbour?"_

_"I wouldn't call someone's back deck a cafe."_

_"You turn highborn and suddenly eating on a stranger's deck without permission is too crass for you?" _

_Marian snorts back a laugh and covers her face with her hands. "Did you hear anything I said before that?"_

_"I did."_

_"Are you planning on ignoring it? I'm fine with that, mind you, I'd just like to know what level of heartbroken I should be."_

_"Ignoring it is the last thing I want to do."_

_"Then why aren't you saying anything, Varric?"_

_"I'm waiting for you to lower your hands, Waffles."_

_Marian feels her heart stammer in her chest. Her hands slide away; Varric's go to her cheeks, cradling, before slipping into her hair, down to her nape. He pulls her into a kiss that she's been waiting a decade for._

Hawke takes two deep, quick breaths that make her lungs scream. She pushes up with her arms and her knees, and then she's upright. Upright. She doesn't know if she can turn around without breaking in half, but she's upright.

She manages the 180 degrees, but it nearly makes her pass out. Her breaths are coming out in ragged huffs now, each one making her vision blur.

"You are dying," the Nightmare tells her as if she doesn't know. "And you are not afraid."

Hawke laughs, coughs, doubles over and almost drops back into the water. She stumbles and grabs the Nightmare's arm to keep herself from the pool.

She swallows, clenches his elbow, and pulls herself up. He watches her, baleful, but doesn't strike her down. He regards her.

"You've lived longer than I thought you would. You've been afraid for _months,_ Champion. Your fears alone have fed me. But now there is nothing left."

Hawke wants to lie down. She also wants to laugh. She also wants to find those fucking daggers and take the son of a bitch with her. Instead, she holds herself upright on his arm, smelling his foul skin, her breath now nothing more than gasps.

"Why, this close to death, do you finally not fear me?"

_"Are you still afraid?" Varric asks, brushing his thick fingers through her hair. Marian doesn't understand; Varric sees it immediately, and his lips take on a little hint of a smile. "You told me that you were scared once. Scared about a war with the Qunari."_

_"Wow," she mumbles, pressing her face into his chest, "I haven't thought about that in...a long time." _

_"For good reason," he admits. _

_It's too hot under the furs, but she doesn't want to move. She doesn't want to leave this place, this muggy tent. Not tomorrow when they ride on Adamant Fortress. Not ever._

_"I want to marry you," Varric says with such surety and suddenness that it makes Marian think she's misheard him. She sharply pulls away from him, eyes studying his face for any sign of jest. "Tonight," he continues. "Cassandra can perform it - everyone we know is here."_

_Marian opens and closes her mouth. She doesn't realise she's shaking her head until Varric's face draws up, suddenly guarded, suddenly unsure. "I must have misread things," he slowly says, trying to smile, trying to hide the hurt without hiding it at all._

_"I want to," she insists quickly, a hand going to his chest, curling. "I want to marry you. Right now. No one else, just us and Cassandra."_

_Varric nods and can't stop nodding. He swallows and pulls her closer, bruising her lips with the intensity of his kisses. And then he pulls away and reaches for his tunic. "I'll wake Cassandra."_

_"Don't let her stab you."_

_"Nothing can kill me now, Waffles."_

Months. She's been here months.

Hawke feels her legs giving out beneath her. The Nightmare watches her, impassive as she slides down to her knees again, tearing his robes as she descends. "Kill me," she tells him. "End it. You can't do anything else to me."

"I can do one thing," he smiles that crooked, awful smile. He effortlessly pulls free.

He leaves her there.

She sobs and goes in and out of consciousness. She falls into the shallow water, half-breathing it in, half-flailing to get to the closest sandbar.

There isn't a God on her lips when she begins to blackout for the last time, when she knows this is the end. _I'm sorry,_ she mouths. Everything is soft now - everything is a fog of green, green sky. _I love you._

She closes her eyes because there's nothing else she can do. She breathes in a nostril-full of water and chokes herself into oblivion.

It's kind of pretty in a way. That sky.

* * *


End file.
